... And it's ALL my mother's fault!
It started last Summer, well no, it was Spring (the end of April, 2025, to be exact), when I casually mentioned how nice it would be to have some fill-dirt to even out some of the low spots in my yard, top off my garden beds, and level out the ground that lay exposed after the absolute scalping my laurel hedge endured. Fast forward a couple of days to me waking up to a rumbling dump truck unloading FIVE cubic yards of dirt in my driveway that my mother ordered without telling me.
Now, I'm not naturally the jealous type, but I think it's worth noting, my sister gets gifts like adorable sets of pajamas, and fancy baking sheets she'll never use, a little outdoor bistro set for her patio, a new throw rug ...
I get dirt.
It's not that it happens to be dirt, I'd be lying if I said I didn't want the dirt, I would've just preferred it on my terms. My sister gets gifts that make her life easier, or more pleasurable; a little upgrade here and there. My gifts arrive as spontaneous character-building exercises (I'm not entirely sold on the idea that the real treasure is the character we built along the way), also, I don't think anyone has to connect a lot of dots here to discover the complete lack of affection I maintain for surprises.
For the curious among you, let me share how some of these conversations go, for instance, the dirt. In passing, I comment nonchalantly something like, "I could use some fill dirt around here, around 2 yards would probably do, I think?"
Topic dropped.
*insert delivery here*
"First of all, what in the HELL is happening in my driveway? Second, that looks like a little more than TWO YARDS!"
"Well they wouldn't deliver two, they only deliver if you order three and up, so I got five!"
"I— " In TV land this is where I'd break the 4th wall, look directly into the camera, and wonder if you and I just heard the same thing ...
Over a year later, and this is almost one of those funny stories you look back on fondly.
I was, however, able to amply fill some of the ankle-breaker holes in my back yard, and reseed some lawn, and the sunken parts around my hedge have been bulked up nicely, and I got the chance to plant some flowers (dahlias, of course!) in the space while I wait for the hedge to fluff back up a little, plus this Spring my landlord and his buddy spread cedar bark for me because he, too, lacks spacial awareness and ordered way too much for his mother's house, leaving him to spend a couple of weeks trying to give it away to everyone in the neighborhood ... It's comforting to know we're not the only ones, sometimes. It all came together in the end, I suppose, but it did not (surprisingly) teach me to keep my mouth shut!
Which lead me to, once again, being awoken by the familiar vibrations of a dump truck depositing yet another massive load in my driveway. Four cords of wood this time, and during the most nauseating heat-wave of the year. But wait, there's more! The delivery mainly consisted of log rounds the dude couldn't even be bothered to split first (even though his internet ad swore up and down this had already been done, with just a FEW slightly larger pieces that may need extra attention according to one's own preferences, seasoned, and ready to burn - ALL a lie), many of which he just let roll out into the street. I don't mean to sound like a snob or anything, but this isn't a dump massive logs in the street kind of neighborhood, though, come to think of it, I can't imagine all that many neighborhoods are that kind of place, and I grew up deep in timber-country! I was astounded that anyone had the audacity to dump that kind of a load off for a little granny in a cotton house-dress, and then peel out down the street! Anyone with an ounce of integrity, who knew what he was hauling, would've looked at the situation and said, "Ma'am, let me take this load somewhere else, and come back with the right stuff for you," You know ... Maybe starting with the stuff he actually advertised to begin with.
I may be a Longshoreman's daughter, but I'm also a Logger's granddaughter, and everything about that delivery was shameful on their end.
No, I am not crying myself to sleep over big wood. It's just that one of my fundamental beliefs is that a customer has the right to make informed decisions. These people were so desperate to make a sale they didn't care how they did it, what lie they had to tell, and how much it would inconvenience anyone else. And that goes against everything I believe about business, and putting people first ... Always. Possibly the craziest piece of this is how they keep (to this day!) begging my mother to leave them a glowing online review. Meanwhile, I'm waiting in the wings to go scorched earth on her behalf the second she lets me off the leash. The best part was how, thanks to the heat, I could only begin moving and stacking the smaller pieces I could handle by myself after sundown, which had me literally working through the nights, greased up with the most potent homemade mosquito repellent I could stand, out there partying 'til sunup with the local coyotes, and lurking perverts. Since I had to begin immediately, there was no such thing as waiting one or two days for cooler weather to arrive, as my neighbors were already having to swerve their cars to get around the heap ... Oh. Did I mention I'm a renter? AND! I live right across the street from my landlord, on a street full of all of his besties? It's not exactly the kind of place you want to become an annoyance, or god-forbid the local eyesore. I work my ass off to keep this place from looking like the Clampetts just coasted in on their jalopy & set up residence, so I'm not exactly keen on having dirty tricks pulled on me, especially the kind that make everything downstream more difficult.
Long story short-ish, I stacked as much of it as I could by myself, and rollllllled the rest into a more manageable configuration that is, at the very least, behind the appropriate boundary lines, and not causing traffic jams for the morning commuters. My woodpile, however, remains the gift that keeps on giving well into 2026. Do I mean because of the blissful heat it gives off in my fireplace? Oh no, of course not, nothing like that! It was too green (that is way too generous of a term for it - the majority of the load was soaking wet, waterlogged even) to burn last Fall / Winter. Even when my neighbor's husband (and he is by no means, a little guy, and can definitely get the lid off a pickle jar) came over to asses the situation, his axe landed with the sound of a squish, and bounced off the wood leaving nary a mark. Now, I'm a small town girl, he's a Midwest boy - we are certainly no strangers to the woodpile, and all we could do is just stand there blinking at my driveway full of sponge. I mean, did this wood come from Gary Ridgway, because why is it acting like it was dredged from the bottom of the Green River?! Nevertheless, the character-building persisted with where it was stacked, and how many times I've had to move it since ... I know what you're probably thinking, that sounds like a skill-issue on my part, but stay with me here. The original place I put it was always supposed to be temporary.
Here are the three initial pieces of thought that went into the location selection: 1) I HAVE TO GET IT OFF THE STREET RIGHT NOW! 2) Part of it was always going to be moved to a cute little wood-holder that I was going to put alongside my back porch (I just hadn't bought one yet). Actually, I had a couple of neighbors come together and make sure I got one that was more than likely going to end up in a landfill, so that was kind of sweet, plus it's got too much life left in it to write it off just yet, so I'm happy it found a home with me. Finally, 3) I've lived here for 14 years at this point, and for about 12 of those years I've been threatened with a new fence every single Summer. Am I being dramatic? Yes, a little. But here's the thing you have to understand about this place, if there is a choice between inconveniencing themselves, or you, the choice will always be the latter. Plus, the folks they end up hiring for their "odd jobs" are most generally less than scrupulous time-wasters, so I have lived under a cloud of potential maximum disruption for over a decade, constantly waiting for the boot to drop. From the beginning, the fence wasn't so bad, the bottom has been rotting off the entire time, but about 7 years ago it got a paint job, and seemed decent-looking enough to pull through, until the land shifted about 3 years ago, and now there's this big, ugly sagging part right in the middle that made slapping a new coat of paint on it this Summer tantamount to putting lipstick on a pig. Alright, so there are three neighbors that "own" this fence ... None of whom is me, so I'm at the mercy of three different families deciding when they're going to divvy up the expense and start building the new fence. Yet, last year there was a glimmer of hope! I was assured that if not that year, that in the near future a new fence would be constructed, it was all decided except the start-date, and that the monstrosity we were currently dealing with was, in fact, a tear down. Let me emphasize ... A TEAR DOWN. Do you hear what I'm saying to you? These are also not the kind of people worried about salvaging materials.
Eureka! I had a place to stash my wood! It's not a new fence anyone's trying to save, and I can't really hurt it - perfect.
And so began the stacking ... Not ON the fence, I'm not completely insane. I left enough room to drop a tarp behind the pile to keep my (extremely wet) wood dry(?) through the rainy seasons, and protect the fence everyone hates. Remember, this is all temporary, the haste was to get the rounds off the street, I quite frankly didn't care WHERE the wood went in my back yard as long as I wasn't causing a literal log-jam on the only road leading in to, or out of my cul-de-sac. Somewhere in the process, it got a leetle too close to the fence, mind you, I was just coming out of months of excruciating tendonitis in both thumbs, and I was operating with a 16 year injury I hadn't begun properly addressing yet, so mistakes were made. I admit it! I also didn't get a chance to tarp it up before the early rains started in, and it didn't take long at all for my original plan fall completely apart ... Whatever, I'll deal with it when it warms up, I thought. One thing is for certain, I am not working myself to the bone, in freezing temperatures, over a bunch of junk that ultimately doesn't matter. That's when somebody decided it did matter, and matter very much, indeed!
Great.
Before the official thaw-out of Spring, we had a few deceptively warm days where everyone races outside to start tidying up after a long, dreary Winter. It was during said frenzy that I was informed that the house I share The Fence with was going up for sale. Oh, okay, so let the new guy decide what to do about the fence, whether he wants a new one or not, cool. Got it. Folks ... I truly am, a naïve, Sweet Summer Child ... To eke a few extra ducats out of the new suckers neighbors, the fence that was Going. To. Be. Torn. Down. was now getting "repaired" and repainted, and they need access to it, from my side naturally, because wealthy people tend not to build fences they can repair from their own property. Like, why would they want to see the "ugly" side? No, they give you the ugly side, and entitle themselves to tramp in and out of your joint to perform all of the maintenance in perpetuity ... And so, I headed back to the woodpile ... I had exactly one afternoon of sunshine to move approximately 1 cord of the wood that would give a person about a body-width to navigate to, and fro to replace the most derelict boards. No prob!
I must tell you, I did not have time to be cute with it. I threw wood all over this yard, to the point it looks like I experienced some kind of health-related episode.
I wasn't doing it with a bad attitude though, I had my music on, I was enjoying the vitamin D, I just didn't have it in me to daintily pick up one piece of wood, and trot over to another portion of the yard to delicately p l a c e it back down. It had to get off the fence. It got off the fence. Incidentally, the same day I was She-Hulking my through the woodpile, they were having drone footage of their property taken for the listing page, and when they get to the big neighborhood "money shot," the guy ultimately had to go in and Photoshop my wood-tantrum out of existence, so it ended up being this weird smear of brown-green slop, when my yard is typically quite cute (if I do say so!). I had to laugh though, because before the house went up, there was literally ONE sunny day to take the drone shots, so I know it was absolutely the day I was throwing wood around like a maniac ... They say, good fences make good neighbors, and all I can really verify is that this monstrosity has turned us all into lunatics of varying degrees. They also say if you chop your own wood it warms you twice, well friends, this "gift" has had me in a sweat over the last year more times than I can count!
I can proudly(?) say that I finally got my woodpile neatly put back together, no doubt, leaving plenty of room for air flow (we wouldn't want anything to happen to that precious, patchwork fence...), 1 cord was sold out of my driveway, and have about 1-ish left to split, stack, and cover before El-Nio sweeps through here this Fall. I honestly don't know how this is going to go, I've been stood up over this woodpile so many times it's literally worse than the Homecoming dance of 1994! When I'm not being comprehensively ignored, or avoided by everyone who said they'd help, I've got every out-of-work handy man cold-knocking my door - which would be AWESOME if they didn't all turn out to be weirdos. It always starts well enough with promises to wrap this one little chore up in a single afternoon, then it's how they could take care of the moss in my driveway ... The very moss I could (and usually do) remove myself if it weren't for that pesky pile of wood in my driveway. Then, they start picking out about a hundred other things they think I'm slacking on that they could fix for me, whilst ignoring the material reality all around us ...
This entire Summer, our street has been a veritable dust-bowl.
I've got two construction sites directly across from me - one guy is building from the ground up, which has required massive excavation efforts, and the family right next to him is landscaping their entire lot ... I don't need a stranger to tell me how filthy the exterior of my house is, I'm also not bellyaching about it and making my neighbors' lives more irritating than necessary - they all have enough on their plates dealing with questionable crews, and the dreaded permit office, they don't need me giving them grief about the process. That said, I'm certainly not paying anyone, between haboobs, to swab my siding on a Saturday, when I know it will be all junked up again by 8 A.M. Monday morning! There will be a day when all of the Tonka Trucks load up and drive away for good, and that is when I'll get busy putting my place back in order (probably to the backbeat of swinging hammers, and nail guns for the next two years!), but insulting me on the upkeep of my home all the while ignoring how I'm currently living in the eye of an ever changing, albeit, temporary storm really isn't the approach that's going to get me to loosen my purse-strings, I can tell you that much.
"Is that vintage car for sale? Oh, is that an ATV as well, how much would you take for that? We can calculate the price of those into the payment for the work!" But before we even get to nail down a date, and a wage, suddenly they're no longer interested in the work, they're not really interested in the car, they kinda just want the ATV, and definitely only want to pay Repo-Depot prices for it. Stop wasting my time, sir! I need solutions, not a chin-wag. One thing I know for sure, I will donate that damn car to the first High School I find that still has an auto shop program, before I listen to one more flaky himbo try to low-ball me over it.
The fun didn't end there!
There was, after all, The Incident, in which my involvement began once my mother shouted, "Get outside! He's gonna need a witness no matter what happens ..."
Such comforting words.
What started as a simple trespass on a warm evening last Summer, ended with a shooting, 5-6 squad cars, two men temporarily apprehended, a Boomer with a silencer, and one overgrown glue-sniffer on the loose, running his mouth, lying, threatening, and harassing nearly every neighbor and officer he could get his yap on for over FOUR HOURS (the body-cam footage could be cut down into the most incredible Wes Anderson-esque short film imaginable). By no means do I want to make light of the situation, and that's probably why I've refrained from even really talking about the ridiculousness of it all, for the most part. There were so many absurdities happening all at once, and for someone who appreciates dark humor as deeply as I do, what I never want to do is become profoundly insulting, because the fact remains that peoples' lives could've been forever changed, or even ended that night, and that is no small thing. I should mention that no one died. There were no injuries beyond a literal scratch, and maybe a few bruised egos here, or there. Everyone made it home alive, and I think we were all thankful for that. I certainly didn't want anyone to die, and I didn't want anyone to feel like they had to kill someone. It was a lovely night (until it wasn't), right when you start to relax into the beginning of Summer, and that's all it ever should've been.
Baby's first subpoena!
Exactly one year to the date of The Incident, I got the kind of invitation to which your required RSVP is an unequivocal "yes." I was set to testify in court over said shooting, and describe to a room full of people how my mother and I were glued to my picture window like Gladys Kravitz waiting to catch Samantha Stevens wiggling her nose to activate her magic, before exclaiming, "Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Oh, shit!" As we raced outside to have an obvious presence, and bear witness to what was happening. However, since last Summer, folks have packed up and moved house, while others have received job offers across the country, and one of the houses the event took place at has been completely demolished ... Everything has changed, leaving me to wonder if I was going to be celebrating Arrestmas alone this year, but by some prosecutorial miracle we were all primed to be reunited at the local municipal courthouse for a wholesome holiday observance. Before we could strike up the festivities and hang the bunting, court was delayed for two-ish months.
Okay, back to our regularly scheduled Summer activities then, I guess...
Funny thing is, though, on the night of the originally scheduled court date, my home was prowled, and not in a subtle way a hungry raccoon might dig through a flower pot, or knock over some wood, or something. Potential entry points to my house were very obviously targeted by a rather large (rather dumb) human. I'm not accusing anyone specifically, but as I've mentioned, I've lived in this same spot for 14 years, and the only time I ever have a problem here is when one particular person comes to visit his mother every Summer he's allowed / available to do so. Like clockwork, the weather heats up, and so do the nocturnal activities of the local ne'erdowell. The cycle is so comically predictable, that I'd almost feel sorry for the guy if it ISN'T him, because some other crook has got his schedule absolutely dialed! Additionally, the dude has a rap sheet longer than a CVS receipt, spanning nearly three decades (and that's only counting when he's been caught), so if things start to go a little sideways in the neighborhood, he is always suspect number one. To be fair, I can't imagine that actually feels very good on his end. People hang neon poster-board signs warning the rest of us when he's back, and I don't think anyone (besides me, possibly) actually wants to be the community pariah, but I can't sidestep the obvious here: He's earned it through the past thirty years of his actions.
None of us can just throw social norms, rules, and laws out the window and act so entitled to other people's property, and private spaces as if they were our own personal playground, and expect everyone else to go along with it. On the one hand, I'm compassionate towards those suffering addiction, and if that's what's motivating the behavior, I would hope the city, or county would step in at some point, and mandate treatment for as long as it takes. I hate the idea of people out there flailing directionless, and with no true form of help, or support to overcome their problems. I also don't want to see anyone harmed just because they wanna lift a few things to sell to feed an addiction they can't seem to beat. That doesn't mean I'm okay with being ripped off! I'm just saying, you know, can appreciate the struggle, and I can hold two thoughts in my head at once. Every single one of us is out here dealing with something, that's not exactly hard to relate to.
On the other hand ... When your problem becomes my trauma, that's where I draw a hard line. Tearing down screens from women's windows, and trying to gain entry, or access to their homes, being caught red-handed, coming face-to-face with screaming homeowners who have to send the cops after you because they don't know if you're just there to rob them, or ... ? I'm sorry, but to me, a home invasion is a threat to my very person, and life. Forcing entry into a home, and getting all ten toes over the threshold in Washington State is crazy work! We may not exactly be considered a stand-your-ground state by definition, but according to case law, thanks to State v. Studd & State v. Redmond, and RCW 9A.16.050(2), we have no duty to retreat before using force to protect ourselves. Why anyone would be eager to test that, is completely beyond my comprehension.
So what happened? Plea deal. Two years of probation. Trial cancelled. Next on the docket ...
And life goes on.
Much to everyone's disappointment (I'm so sure), my Kato moment was ripped from my clutches, but that's okay, I don't think I'm quite cut out for court anyway. I know a few people from my past who would've argued the opposite, but in this instance, I just don't think I could stomach watching all the phony performances. One thing this whole ordeal has highlighted for me is really understanding the difference between image, and reputation. It doesn't matter how well you scrub up, or what persona you attempt to embody, anyone can go to court looking like an alter boy, and read polished statements off a sheet of paper, or relay overly rehearsed testimony, but what matters in this world is what you're known for.
Who are you when no one is looking?
As for myself? I don't care what my neighbors think of me. It's no secret that I come across like a rude, cold, stand-offish, hard to get to know, uppity bitch. Those things aren't even entirely false! But what I hope they know is that when there's trouble, I'll show up for them - no matter what.
We can blame it on all of that damn character-building my mother forced on me ...
